Carved in raised Black Letter, the Gothic script common to formal monumental work of the period, the text breaks off and resumes in pieces, its edges lost where the remaining fragments of the covering slab have disappeared. What survives is enough to identify the tomb's occupant, to name the man who made it, and to deliver a memento mori with the blunt economy typical of late medieval funerary Latin: "I am what you will be; I was what you are."

The tomb almost certainly belongs to a member of the Fitzgerald family, specifically, in all likelihood, Garret fitz Thomas Fitzgeralde of Burnchurch. A man of that name, recorded as "Gerrot fitz Thomas Fitzgerald of Burnchurch, gentleman," received a pardon on 25th February 1561 to 1562 and was still living in 1569. The inscription, as reconstructed by the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, identifies the deceased as Constable of the Castle of Kilkenny, who died on 1st March 1586. A chest tomb, sometimes called an altar tomb, is a box-shaped monument in which a flat slab, the mensa, forms the lid; here the mensa itself is what survives, in two pieces, while the sides of the box are gone. The closing line of the inscription names the craftsman responsible: "Walterus Kerin fabricavit," Walter Kerin made the tomb. That attribution is relatively rare on Irish medieval stonework, and gives the monument a small additional significance beyond the man it commemorates. Carrigan also recorded two further medieval graveslabs elsewhere in the same graveyard, suggesting the site once held a more substantial concentration of late medieval funerary stonework than survives today.